Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2

Rating:
Summary: Wyoming Tales Spun in Well Worn Colors
Review: As she proved with "The Shipping News", author Annie Proulx has an unmistakably intricate, often elegant writing style. The eleven stories that constitute her latest book are testament to her talent, though the short story format seems to undermine her ability to deepen her characters as much this time. In certain ways, that works just fine since the somewhat interrelated stories almost feel like parables set in her vision of a rural Wyoming caught in a downward economic spiral. She brings a tough yet big-hearted sensibility to her stories, some more than others. But on the whole the approach balances itself out well.

My favorite of the bunch is "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?", which despite its jokey title is actually a serious-minded distillation of the current red-state mentality. It's a compelling tale about a man who can't make a go of his ranch and what it's like to see your traditional way of life eroding on every front. Rancher Gilbert Wolfscale keeps at it, doggedly and half-hopelessly, fighting against the odds to save his land. The author writes about him with a tenderness worthy of a Horton Foote, and with a deep-seeded sympathy both for Gilbert's determination to stay on his home ground and also for his urge to flee. He receives a final blow when saline wastewater pits, the byproduct of coal-bed methane drilling on land next to his, start poisoning his own land. Ranchers are suddenly thrown together with eco-conservationists, but they get nowhere protesting against the politicians and gas company officials who favor proceeding with the drilling. Wolfscale ends up on the open road, driving for the sake of driving and not caring where he's headed. He's about the only character in ''Bad Dirt'' who receives the full measure of her love.

Five of the 11 stories in ''Bad Dirt'' are little more than comic anecdotes about the eccentrics who inhabit Elk Tooth, whose sole distinction is its three popular bars -- Pee Wee's, Muddy's Hole and the Silvertip. In fact, a sixth tale, ''The Old Badger Game,'' is hardly a story at all but an odd animal fable that some drunkard would have told in one of those taverns. The other story worth highlighting is "Man Crawling Out of Trees", which describes through the eyes of a retiring New York couple, the difficulties of being a newcomer to Wyoming. The wife bears the loneliness as best she can, while her husband delights in long drives through his new surroundings, classical music blasting from his car stereo. Through a series of revelations, a flawed marriage is exposed, and the power of place collides with their reality in unexpected ways, and Proulx is careful not to tip her hand toward where her deepest sympathies lie. As a whole, "Bad Dirt" hangs together nicely with recurring minor characters tying the stories unobtrusively. With the exception of a couple of stories that simply seem out of kilter with the rest, Proulx's book certainly makes the ranchland atmosphere of an economically downtrodden but physically beautiful Wyoming come to life.

Rating:
Summary: a fine follow-up to "close range"
Review: I greatly enjoyed Proulx' Close Range collection of short stories,
and Bad Dirt (subtitled "Wyoming Stories 2") is a very worthy
encore. The Close Range stories gave a wonderful flavor to the
rural areas of the state, the people, the land, the warm and the
rough sides, both past and present. Some of the stories were
humorous, others were harrowing, some were a whimsical mix. You'll
find just the same mix (and a bit more) in Bad Dirt. You start off
with a 12-page story about Game & Fish Warden Creel Zmundzinski (who
turns up again in a couple of more stories) that begins in a nice
straightforward fashion, and then takes off into a kind of
humorous Proulx-Stephen King joint venture (or perhaps
Proulx-King-Carl Hiaassen).

Several stories center on the residents and the 3 bars in the tiny
town of Elk City: I very much like reading another of Proulx'
short stories when I feel that I already know the characters well
(one of these is a kind of Proulx-Hiaassen mix involving rental
alligators--it sounds bizarre, but the story works in a truly
delightful way).

The best of the stories is The Wamsutter Wolf, and runs about 35
pages. Buddy Millar lives in a $40/month rental housetrailer
5 miles out from the center of a small boomtown (almost all
trailers). You don't get much for your $40 a month. His only
neighbors live close by in an even grungier trailer--a bully who
beat him up in high school, his wife and passel of grungy young
kids, one of whom is a 4-year-old alcoholic (his father believes
that learning to drink young avoids the problems that come with
learning later). This is a horrifying and harrowing story--
stronger than anything I remember in Close Range. It's very
tough, utterly realistic, and it left me wanting to see it
expanded to about 300 pages as a novel.

Annie Proulx and William Gay (I Hate To See The Evening Sun Go
Down) are the two best short-story writers I've read in many
years--and both write excellent novels as well.